Abandon in Place: Cape Canaveral, August 2010

      Page 4 - Ozymandias

 

We leave Pad 14 to its silence, and roll northward on ICBM Road again, down missile row.

	This is all you get to let you know what went down here

Along the way, we pass Pad 19.

One hell of a lot went down here, too, but you'd never know it to judge by the look of things.

One forlorn sign, baking in the Florida heat, and that's all.

If you're reading this, you're on the internet, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to punch "gemini titan" into google and see what comes up.

As you drive past the entrance road to the pad, if you look in just the right direction, at just the right time, you can get a fleeting glimpse of the erector for the Titan II rocket that propelled the Gemini capsule into space. Unlike most of the other launch pad gantries out here, the Titan II erector was a hinged affair, that was laid down on its back, come launch time. It's still there, rusting away, out in the salt-air, and about all that's left to see is the steel platform framing. It resembles the ribs of a long-dead whale that had beached itself here, and fits the lonesome mood of the rest of this area just about perfectly.

How the mighty have fallen.

As with Mercury Atlas, Gemini Titan flew upon a repurposed ICBM. A machine that was originally designed and built for a primary job which consisted in the killing of millions, should certain persons or institutions deem it necessary to do so.

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Access road and blockhouse at Pad 34

	Wernher Von Braun and all the other rocket scientists worked inside here on Saturn I launches

At the end of ICBM Road, we take a right, onto the access road for Launch Complex 34.

In the distance, the blockhouse hunkers down beneath the harsh Florida sun.

We head straight toward it.

The Saturn rocket program, which this launch complex is the earliest manifestation of, was originally a military project, but along the way, it got handed over to NASA.

The deep connections with long-distance Death Writ Large go on, but the Saturns were never intended to hurl thermonuclear warheads. Their job lied elsewhere, and when NASA took over the program, they lent themselves perfectly as an intermediate step along the Roadway to the Moon.

The blockhouse is long-abandoned, and nothing is stirring in its vicinity.

The access road for Pad 34 intersects the pad perimeter road, and we veer first right, then left, around the blockhouse and toward the beach.

Ruins at Complex 34

From this point of view, it's just another beach access

Incomprehensible ruins greet us along the way to the shoreline.

A few cars share the parking area where we stop and get out.

A security operative drives by in his vehicle.

So long as we face the sea, we're once again presented with an idyllic beach scene, right off of a post card.

Over our shoulders , it's a different matter.

Launch Complex 37 in the distance

A sunshiny day by the sea

In the distance, Launch Complex 37 looms large, bristling with unmistakable signs of ongoing activity.

Closer by, the ambience is one of utter desolation, of rack and ruin, of vegetation slowly reclaiming that which it once held sway over.

Down along the shoreline, it's a sunshiny day by the sea, complete with beach umbrellas.

The three wildly disparate elements in juxtaposition clash dissonantly with each other, and the combination makes for a bizarre and vaguely unsettling scene.

Something is not right, somehow.

Something is wrong somewhere.

 

		Pristine Florida shoreline, just south of Complex 34

And in a very weird kind of way, some of the stuff out here looks almost like an art installation, and there's a very definite aesthetic to it, even though it was never intended to be looked at on those kinds of terms, or even "looked at" at all. Engineers ground it all out by hand, for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that was to get the bird to fly.

Anything else is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

And yet.....

There's very definitely something going on with the look, the feel, the ambience of the place. It's unmistakable.

And it's not what I would call altogether friendly, either.

And yet the place wants to draw you in, too. There is deception at work out here, very subtle deception.

Beachside Mystery

We get back in the car, and decide to roll around the perimeter road, counter-clockwise.

It just kept getting eerier and eerier out there		Rusting rebar tearing concrete to pieces ever so slowly

We're not even sure if we're supposed to be, or allowed to be, where we find ourselves winding along toward, but we keep driving anyway, scarcely faster than a walking pace. A security vehicle in the middle distance glances through our field of view, going we know not where. Did he see us? Does it matter? We do not know. We keep driving.

Bizarre shapes half-buried in the vegetation...		...what the hell is all this stuff, anyway?

And then we round a corner in the vegetation and are confronted by an ominous, overbearing, and powerfully enigmatic ruin, set squarely in the middle of a great concrete flatness, weeds working through the cracks. It is basically indescribable. The words from Shelley's poem Ozymandias spring immediately into my mind:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I jump immediately out of the car and into the midday furnace, camera in hand, knowing full well that not a single one of the pictures I take will convey the least of it. But I fire away anyway. Aside from ourselves, not another soul is here.

A strong sensation of being watched pervades the still air, although there is no sign of such a thing anywhere you look.

 

 

 

 

And yet once again with these essays, I find myself reaching a point where words begin to lose their value and fail to add anything much to the pictures, which themselves completely fail to convey very much of anything at all that might be considered properly useful.

Sigh.

So I guess we'll just look at it as the piece of monumental artwork that it is. As the statement of truly fantastic things, things beyond sensible comprehension, conceived, built, executed, and forgotten, that it is. As the statement of untold hundreds of thousands of hours, of whole lives, hurled into a vast impossible enterprise that was somehow pulled off anyway that it is. As the looming unanswered question which contains its own indecipherable answer that it is. As the symbol of the doom that awaits us all that it is.

Why do I even try?

 

The thing is deeply mysterious, and only becomes more so, the closer you approach it.

How? Why? What? And no answer comes back. A weak breeze sighs across the concrete and has nothing more to offer.

I find myself beneath the abandoned launch stand towering overhead like something out of a Dark Stonehenge, and only then, after having been out here on this expanse of concrete and refractory bricks cooking under the August Florida sun, do I notice that I've been barefoot the entire time and never felt a thing as my exposed feet trod the shimmering surround. I suddenly realize that goddamn, this brick and concrete is HOT! But I do not return to the distant car for my forgotten flipflops. I do not wish to interrupt what I'm doing, even for just a few minutes, and I'll manage without them.

I look over my shoulder, and I see Sean, trying to get a decent picture of it, trying to make some kind of sense of it. Neither task is easy, and neither task may even be doable, for that matter.

I turn back to the enigma looming above me and walk around to its far corner.....

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